


Crushing on Cupid

by kiki_chu



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Mentions of Anxiety Attack, Mentions of Career Ending Injury, Viktor is still a skater, Yuuri isn't a skater
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 22:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14411775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiki_chu/pseuds/kiki_chu
Summary: It's Yuuri's job to help other people find their Soulmates, unfortunately that means that he'll never find his own. Or at least, that's what he thinks.





	Crushing on Cupid

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thanks to [Sleigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleigh).

Yuuri Katsuki was a cupid. It’s the official title for his position, and it only took a couple of months for the embarrassment to wear off. Though it wasn’t like he had to talk about it since his company, SoulMatch Inc, did not exist as far as the general populace was concern. In general, the cupid thing never came up in casual conversations (in fact employees were contractually obligated to not bring it up with people unaffiliated with SoulMatch Inc).

 

Those soulmate messages that everyone received at some point during their twentieth birthday? Cupids were in charge of creating and sending them out. Yuuri came into work five times a week to an inbox full of messages he needed to write, edit, and mail out. He spent a lot of time composing poems. Since he’s in the written division, Yuuri’s daily quota tends to be shorter than the cupids writing texts, emails, or even Phichit who spends forever meticulously getting the perfect angle for his photos, but Yuuri liked to think that he makes up for it in quality.

 

Yuuri hoped that he was able to guide each person he wrote for to their soulmate. Some nights he lay awake in bed wondering if he was too vague in one line, and if as a result that person might never meet with their special someone, or if he would mislead them into marrying the wrong person, or what if they didn’t understand understand what he was hinting at until it was too late and they were married with two children. Usually by that point, when he’s hyperventilating about the possibility of being a homewrecker, Phichit finds him curled into a corner of the bathtub and talks him down to breakfast.

 

But what he regretted the most while crawling into his none-too-soft, dormitory bed, was what he has done to his own soulmate. See, Yuuri had started this job at eighteen, after a knee injury destroyed his dance career before it even had a chance to take off. In desperate need to pay the hospital bills without burdening his parents, Yuuri had answered an ad on a job website and ended up at SoulMatch Inc. The problem being that employment at SoulMatch through your twentieth birthday means you cannot not receive your soulmate message. It wasn’t really a problem since most of the employees joined after locating their soulmate (Phichit was another story since Phichit’s family was in the business and he got scooped up once the company realized the importance of social media and Phichit’s talent for selfies began to bloom).

 

Yuuri hadn’t felt like he had a choice at the time, and so there he was, twenty-three and without even a hint as to how to find his soulmate. Yuuri wondered if his soulmate was desperately, fruitlessly looking for him.

 

He wondered if his soulmate was as lonely as he was.

  
.

 

Viktor Nikiforov had been searching for his soulmate ever since he received his soulmate message seven years ago. The pale pink envelope, unmarked save for the careful print of his name in cyrillic, was slipped underneath the door to his apartment while he was out to lunch with his rinkmates. . At that point in his life he had only just started to show his strength as a competitor in seniors, but he had long since been a media darling, and there were always stories floating around about fans trying to fake a soulmate message. And, of course, there was an actress last year who thought she was opening her soulmate message only to receive a handful of razor blades. Viktor had opened the envelope full of hope and with great caution

 

Inside the envelope was a single black and white polaroid photo. It pictured a studio, light falling on open space and an empty barre. On the hardwood floor was a pair of dark pointe shoes, battered and worn with frayed ribbons. In one dark corner was a figure curled over themself.

 

His soulmate, Viktor knew it even before Yakov told him that the several soulmate messages that arrived for him at the rink were fake. He searched for his dancer: paid special attention anytime ballet came up, attended his ballet cross training obediently, even went so far as to purchase a membership to the local theatre. All to no avail.

 

He agonized over those empty shoes and the unoccupied barre. The more time he spent staring at the tiny figure in the back corner of the room, the clearer he could read the crushing despair in the curve of that spine, and he wondered what it meant. But Viktor won’t know until he finds them, and he without a clue other than ballet, and so he continued his search.

 

So here he was seven years later siping coffee after a dawn photoshoot for one of his sponsors. He was on the verge of retirement and his lack of a partner was increasingly the subject of speculation for the gossip columns. He fingered the edges of his photo. Seven years and it hadn’t faded or discolored at all, soulmate messages were like that, impossible to delete or destroy and completely unseeable by anyone but the two it connected. Viktor tucked the photo back into his wallet and stared blankly out the large cafe windows and over the rocky beach and cresting waves.

 

One last season he told his knees and ankles, weary from standing all day and a life of jumping higher and further. One more season and then what? He could travel the world, performing at ice shows and searching for his dancer in every ballet troupe. Just him, his beloved dog, and the photo that was supposed to lead him to his soulmate.

 

A waitress stopped by his table to ask if he would like more coffee. He shook his head and decided he had recovered enough to resume his exploration of the little ocean side town his sponsor had invaded with camera, model, and crew.

 

Viktor waited until the waitress left with his empty mug and a tip and pushed the wrought iron chair back. The jolt of his chair and the startled grunt behind him yanked Viktor back into focus, and a well-practiced smile twisted his mouth as he turned to see just who he had inconvenienced.

 

The man, asian with a deep tan and a backwards cap, rubbed his hip carefully cradling both a smartphone and a sleeved paper cup in his other hand.

 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you,” Viktor said, standing.

 

The man looked up at Viktor, wide-eyed. Viktor braced himself to greet a fan, but the man leapt backwards, and dashed out of the cafes shouting, “I’m fine! Don’t worry about it”.

 

On his way out, the stranger clipped the shoulder of another man, sending the bystander toppling to the floor. This second man, also dark haired, was not so lucky and his coffee spilt across the cafe’s terracotta floor.

 

Figuring that this was indirectly his fault, Viktor went to help the fallen man. While approaching, Viktor slowed for a second, there was something about that figure…

 

He held his hand out to the other man. “Are you alright?”

 

He’s glad he got the words out when he did, because when the man tilted his face up, Viktor could feel his tongue tying itself in knots. The man's face was slightly rounded, and two sweet but dazed eyes look up at Viktor from behind blue, half-rim glasses. Viktor thought that maybe he heard music, or maybe it was twang of an arrow leaving a bow.

  
.

 

To use up his leftover vacation time, Yuuri booked a room at a bed and breakfast in a small coastal town in Spain that reminded him of his hometown. The town is more bustling than he expected, but Yuuri early one morning a couple of days into his stay and he is in too much need of his fix to care as he crawled out of bed and straight to the cafe down the street, pausing only long enough to exchange his sleepwear for joggers.

 

After the first sip of coffee, Yuuri felt the caffeine rushing through his veins, waging war on the lethargy clinging to his body. Yuuri isn’t sure exactly what he ordered, but each time he lifted the paper cup to his mouth he discovered some new flavor that had been pumped into his cup along with what must have been a couple of extra shots of espresso. It doesn’t taste good by any stretch of the imagination, but all caffeine is good caffeine to pre-10am Yuuri.

 

He’s on his way out of the cafe when he suddenly found himself on his hands and knees, unfinished coffee tragically pooling around him.

 

“Are you alright?”

 

Yuuri tore his eyes away from the coffee and looked up and then up further, into perfect blue eyes set in an equally beautiful face.

 

“I’m… fine,” Yuuri managed after an awkward pause.

 

He glanced away, back to his spilled drink. Apparently he drew the beautiful stranger’s attention to the caffeine massacre across the floor, because the stranger gasped and said, “I’m sorry, this was all my fault. I’ll buy you a new drink. What were you drinking? I’m Viktor by the way.”

 

“Yuuri.” He responded mechanically. “You don’t need to buy me anything, I was nearly done.” Yuuri wondered if his expression belaid his lie.

 

“No, I insist, Yuuri.” Viktor lingered on his name. “Just sit here, at my table. I’ll be right back.”

 

Viktor rushed away, and Yuuri stumbled after him, only managing to catch up when Viktor was already pulling out his wallet to pay the cashier. Viktor smiled at Yuuri’s approach.

 

“I wasn’t sure what you had, so I just had the barista recommend a drink.”

 

“It’s really not necessary.”

 

Yuuri’s protests did nothing to stop Viktor from pulling a couple of bills from his wallet. As he did so, something else fell from Viktor’s wallet. Viktor didn’t notice as preoccupied as he seemed to be by the barista’s pastry pitch, so Yuuri bent down to pick it up. The polaroid photo had landed upside down so Yuuri absently flipped it right-side up as he straightened.

 

“Viktor, you dropped… this?”

 

Yuuri knew that ballet studio. He had spent hours on that barre. And there, in the very darkest corner of the room, was that not Yuuri himself? His hand trembled.

 

“Ah! Thanks for picking it up. Yuuri?” A pause and then Viktor’s tone changed. “Yuuri, can you see it?”

 

Yuuri ripped his his eyes from the photo to look back at Viktor and found the other man beaming, blue eyes practically sparkling, and his mouth almost forming the shape of a heart.

 

Viktor held one hand out to Yuuri. “Yuuri, I’m your soulmate!”

  
.

 

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

 

Phichit did his best to contain his excited gasps as he pressed his smartphone against the cafe’s front window. He kept glancing back and forth between the scene playing out before him and the recording of it on his phone’s screen. He had needed to call in so many favors to pull this off, had worried that he had destroyed it all at the last minute by bumping into Yuuri’s soulmate; but seeing that fragile look of hope replacing the frequent misery in Yuuri’s eyes made all Phichit’s effort worth it.

 

All in a day’s work for a cupid. He couldn’t wait to tell Celestino about it, to share the video he was recording.

 

Then Yuuri places his hand in Viktor’s and Phichit couldn’t contain his delighted squeal.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading ❤


End file.
